“Then I found Robbie Basho and John Fahey records and latched onto those really hard. “By the time I was in punk and rock bands in high school, I was a huge Sonic Youth fan, weird tuning gods,” he recalls. Growing up an hour away in Rockford, Illinois, as a teenager he travelled into the city, digging for records by Smog, Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Tortoise.
While Walker moved to New York in 2019, Course In Fable is wholly a Chicago record. His decisions as a player are incredible, one in a million.” The dynamic between us is really friendly, there’s a push and pull and I’d trust him with any music. That record they did, is how we first came together – let’s make a great acoustic duo record, but we always end up talking about Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix or Minutemen, that’s what Chicago music is to me, punk-rock influenced prog. We’re big fans of John Renbourn and Bert Jansch. “Bill’s a straight-up musician, educated, from a musical background. There’s a hint of irony in the playing, it’s a nod to people who sell used solid-state amps for way too much money. “I like to call them ‘bald guy with ponytail’ guitar players, who have a beer belly and a Yes Fragile tour T-shirt. “I told Bill, ‘Make your solos sound like you’re a professor at Berklee in 1985, trying to prove something’,” says Walker. On Course In Fable, their fluent conversations dart and shimmy through complex arrangements, an air of rejuvenated joy in the intricate arrangements. Joining Walker on his journey into the progosphere is longstanding foil Bill MacKay, with whom he’s made a pair of albums of interlocking guitar exploration. It’s all the mystical fairy lyrics I can muster for now, a new era.” This time, I was going for things more rooted in John Abercrombie, Steve Hackett and Derek Bailey, not droney folk, I feel like I’ve said all I need to say on that. “My bread and butter has always been cyclical droning pieces, from years of being a Sandy Bull and John Fahey fan. I can’t imagine making something like that again though, but they loom large. That music is still influential because of how innovative and fearless it was. “I was just getting my start, and wearing my influences really hard on my sleeve. “The UK prog-folk records were a bit on the nose,” he says. Not one for standing still, Walker has also made two albums with jazz drummer Charles Rumback and a live record with Japanese psych-rockers Kikagaku Moyo. The evolution was advanced on 2018’s Deafman Glance, and Course In Fable completes the journey. By 2016’s Golden Songs That Have Been Sung, he was pointing towards more ambitious abstractions, less indebted to Martyn, Jansch and Tim Buckley. While he’s grateful for “the opportunities it brought me”, Walker says the troubadour stylings of 2014 debut All Kinds Of You and Primrose Green belong to a different era. I love prog that’s rooted in reality, not so much the dwarves and magical fairies.” Droney, feedbacky stuff, tapping, 12-string playing, fingerstyle, solos… Genesis is not prog with a capital P, they had a sense of humour. Steve Hackett was doing stuff nobody else did. “I wanted it to sound like if Peter Gabriel was on Thrill Jockey,” Walker explains, from his home in the hills of western Massachusetts.
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